August 2022
I worked with Alan for about a year, quite a few years ago as a troubled teen. I had had endless amounts of therapy and group work but nothing had helped. I was in a victim mindset, desperate to be rescued. Then funding became available for me to have counselling sessions with Alan and he made me see my worth, talent and potential. He was always firm with me that he hadn't done the work and that it was in fact me who climbed herself to recovery, just with tips and tricks from Alan along the way.
Alan taught me how to regulate my emotions and feelings and how to cope with my past.
He ensured that I felt safe and secure and I told him things I had never told anyone and this was a huge factor in my recovery.
I was able to heal from things that I never thought I could. He was able to put a lot of my issues into perspective to my family, that just didn't understand how I felt and that meant that they were able to support me in the right and proper way when it was time for our counselling to end.
When I first met Alan I was very unstable and I wasn't a very nice person to my loved ones because I was so consumed by my depression at the time.
Alan helped me transform myself into a respectable young lady that now has a family and a very rewarding career in childcare.
The coping mechanisms and lessons Alan taught me have stayed with me all these years.
If I am ever to need support again, I would only ever go to Alan.
K, Midlands, England 04 08 2022
April 2023
Hi Alan, I wanted to send you a goodbye message.
You've been my best health professional to date - you always explained things in clear and concise ways, and allowed me to see things from a perspective I wouldn't've before.
I felt very safe and comfortable with you, and you always provided helpful and practical advice.
I hope that whatever you do next you enjoy, and I'm sure you'll excel in it.
Yours truly, L. ,Midlands, England 26 04 2023.
A) Single Session Consultation for Individual Adults.
A 50 (fifty) minutes conversation via video call or phone, plus 10 (ten) minutes self-review of session via an optional written 'message to myself' exercize.
Single session consultation is accessible via video or phone call to be scheduled into our diaries, following your completion and return of the Pre-Session Questionnaire, supplied by email.
Further help can be discussed.
1) What is Personal Consultancy ? Personal Consultancy is a relationship-based, one-to-one practice (or one-to-two with couples) offered by professionals who integrate therapeutic helping with coaching. In this way every client has the benefit of attention given with sensitivity and care to their needs for emotional and psychological help along with a focus and support for their aims and goals and the skills they may need to develop and practice to achieve these.
Personal Consultancy is client-centred. The consultee is encouraged to define their aim or goal and is supported to work towards this. This is one way in which Personal Consultancy may differ from other forms of talking help practices.
2) What can Personal Consultancy do for me? Depending upon what issue(s) you want to address, and what arises / happens as we talk together, and if you can make a commitment to facing-up to difficulties and working at these, you will make progress with support. You will have the support of a non-judgmental, dedicated professional practitioner who will make a commitment to your progress toward healing and achievement.
3) Can Personal Consultancy help with serious, severe, long-term, complex or intense problems ?
Personal Consultancy can help with a wide range of problems. Personal Consultancy is for you if you recognise yourself in the descriptions below. In telling a friend or relative about your difficulties, you might be saying: 'It's complicated!' You may have had experiences affecting you recently, in the past year or over the longer-term. These difficulties may show up in your:
You may have defined problems for which you have a name, but they are not recognised or understood in any other form of helping you have approached.
You may have a general sense of dismay, hopelessness or frustration with how your life is going.
You may have a pattern of disappointment and recognition that you are caught up in the same cycle, without a clear plan or action available or a view of your future.
You may feel a lack of motivation or a sense that your efforts are often of little use leaving you feeling stuck.
4) How long does it take ? When can I expect to have made progress so I can stop having sessions?
The Personal Consultancy offered here is in a short series of sets of four sessions, or a one-off single session, for my client to choose. The series of four sessions if chosen, is preceded by a free discovery conversation.
If a Single Session Consultation is chosen then this is preceded only by self-completion and return of a pre-session questionnaire, allowing the single consultation to be scheduled sooner. we will have the opportunity to focus on your one chosen issue or topic. Further help is available.
In the initial one of the et of four sessions we will have the opportunity to explore your issues, circumstances, your reasons and purposes for choosing Personal Consultancy. You may have had a more in-depth conversation than ever before and have some improved awareness of some of these issues.
We will review together progress with your plan, toward the end of the set of four sessions. It will be your choice as to whether you will want to work with me in a series of four further sessions.
It is helpful for us both to know at the start of a set of four sessions, if you have chosen to make it your final set.
5) Why can't I buy just one session at a time ? Why must I buy a package of sessions ?
You may be thinking that 'after all, I may not like this, 'or 'be able to understand or get along with the practitioner,' or the practitioner may not quite get 'who I am' or 'how I'm feeling or thinking.'
Personal Consultancy is designed to be a short-to-medium term way of helping. Just as in any relationship based upon talking together, it takes a while to get to know each other. We have the benefit of the free Discovery Session, initially. Only after this initial phase can we begin to shape our plan for work together and to begin with the tasks this raises.
Progress is highlighted as we review this together after we have begun to tackle these issue(s). We review this progress through talking together about your feelings and thoughts and what has been noticed by you. You may have had conversations with close and trusted others, in which they have shared with you what they have noticed.
We will only be able to be assured that this process of ongoing support is happening for you if there is a commitment from both of us to every one of our appointments. In each session we will review together whether the session is useful for you and if you have made any gains in ideas or skills or tasks.
Homework tasks are important to support the process of learning, developing and understanding and to make approaches toward the aims or goals in your plan.
I will welcome your feedback on my practice.
6) Why don't you just offer counselling or coaching at a lower fee rate?
I have found in my professional practice over the past two decades, since the millenium, that real and lasting progress is made by clients when they have had the benefit of using the practitioner's skills of therapeutic communication and in-depth understanding to promote self-acceptance and inner healing along with taking their own action on their self-chosen tasks of skills development or facing-up to obstacles to their aim or goal.